Product Description

Michel is a civil-servant, an account manager at the Ministry of Culture. He is single, and likes his pleasures pre-packaged: game shows, TV movies, pornography and instant mash. When his father is murdered and he comes into some money, Michel takes leave of absence to go on a package tour to Thailand. Relieved to get away, he is nonetheless infuriated by the shallow hypocrisy and mediocrity of his fellow travellers. Only the awkward Valerie attracts his attention. Too bashful to pursue her, Michel prefers the uncomplicated pleasures of Thai massage parlours and sex with local women. Western society, he believes, has lost the sense of the other - the sensual, the exotic - that is necessary to pleasure. Back in Paris, he calls Valerie and they plunge into a passionate affair which strays far beyond the bounds of Michel's previous 'vanilla' existence, into S&M, partner-swapping and sex in public. Michel quits his job, and tries to help Valerie and her boss, Jean-Yves, in their ailing travel business, putting his philosophy into practice by offering consenting adults sexual tourism in the third world. The project is risky, but when the three return to Thailand, Michel discovers that sex is neither the most consuming nor the most dangerous of human passions...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #40722 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
'Reading Houellebecq is like being caught up in a tropical storm: you are blown away by the ferocity of his imagination' Observer

About the Author
Michel Houellebecq lives in County Cork, Ireland. He is the author of two previous novels, Atomised and Whatever. He is also a poet, essayist and rap artist.

Customer Reviews

Few flaws, many touches of genius
Houellebecq is a man who breaks taboo's, probably the only major author alive who tackles subjects such as sexual tourism, paedophilia, the alieness of islamic culture, inter-racial sexual attraction, all of which are surely some of the most noteworthy socio-historical phenomonen of the new millenium, yet not the topics that tend to win backslapping literary awards, especially not when tackled with the distinctive Houellebecqian pens of political incorrectness and semi-pornography.
Yet the world needs such authors more than it needs booker prize winners, and here is another work of art we can turn to if we wish to understand, or at least frame the debate, on some of the great issues and tensions of the age.

Through means of a story that revolves mainly around the far eastern sex trade, Houellebecq asks questions about the point of modern western civlisation, a civilisation which seems to have only hedonistic pleasure and 'individuality' remaining as values. I don't think Houellebecq is making a damning indictment of the sins of the flesh here ( you can't read some of his passages or anything about his private life to believe that) but rather expressing a somewhat gloomy Schopenhauerian kind of view that the human animal is just not meant to be happy and contented, that a fat and bloated west will not be able to begin a sustainable phase of contented pleasure seeking because nature just doesn't do happiness as an end in itself. Nature merely serves us short-term hedonistic tricks that might reward its own darwinian purposes, but not the ultimate contentment of the human being.

The author's many criticism's of Islam got him into even more hot water here than his justification of sexual tourism, but his interlocking of the two subjects now seems like some kind of bitter genius after 9/11 and Bali. Young muslim men blow themselves up in order to tear apart the limbs and bodies of infidel westerners enjoying the forbidden pleasures of nubile young asian women. Yet as Houellebecq dryly points out, the flesh pots of Thailand are pretty much the closest environment on earth to that of the 72 virgins which those young muslims think will be their reward for killing innocents. Why does man insist on believing in such self-denying esotoric virtues, when thier ultimate reward could be made possible by a simple economic transaction in the here and now? Pleasure will never be made simple, and happiness forever found unattainable in Houellebecq's grim and misanthropic vision of humanity.

Provocative, challenging and intelligent
Platform is a fine novel. It's readable, it's intelligent and funny, but above all, and like most really good literature, it's challenging, troubling, and puts forward more questions than answers. A strong narrative holds together the many different facets to the novel: love story, pornography, analysis of the travel industry, philosophy, moral inquiry, critique of globalization and Western civilization.

Camus is a clear influence on Houellebecq. Paralleling the death of Meursault's mother in The Outsider, Platform begins with the death of Michel the narrator's father. Michel mirrors Meursault's emotional detachment from the loss. Like Meursault, Michel is a morally detached individual, refusing to conform to the expectations of Western civilization and society, pursuing instead his own path of libertinism. And just as in The Outsider, Michel is caught up in conflicting cultures.

Platform quite deliberately raises troubling authorial questions. Is Michel the narrator simply a mouthpiece for Michel the author's views? It is not an easy question to answer, but one which persists throughout the novel and impacts on the way in which it is read. For Michel the author has courted trouble in France for his disparaging views on Islam, Christianity and Judaism; and Michel the narrator holds various controversial and unsettling opinions, most notably on Islam and on the subject of sex tourism, on which neutrality on the reader's part is not an obvious option.

The novel cleverly juxtaposes the love story with the semi-pornographic descriptions of sex; it dwells on contrasting civilizations, the exotic East and the stale West, and the complications of the rival contrast between the secular hedonism of the West and the Islam of the East; and it explores, and manages to interrelate within what amounts to an analysis of globalization, the subjects of sex, tourism, the allure of an Eastern paradise, and Western consumer and business values.

Houellebecq, quite rightly, does not provide some neatly wrapped answer to all the questions his novel raises. Instead, it is left to the reader to contemplate the implications of the story, to work at making sense of the contradictions posed, to judge whether the apparent moral vacuum at the heart of the novel is filled. And it is this that makes Platform such a good book: by refusing to patronize its readers and express only what they want to read, it invites its readers to confront and provide their own answers to the provocative and difficult questions posed.

sex&death
So some people loathe him. Some people think he's racist and sexist. Some people say he moved to Ireland due to the hatred he has encountered from the content of his novels. Well stuff those some people.
Platform is funny and heartbreaking, in the driest ways possible. It made me feel the way Lolita made me feel the first time I read it, but with language reminiscent of Camus (at least in this translation anyway).
I don't really know how to write reviews, but this novel seems to speak with such a personal tongue, almost like a niggling voice in your own head that tells you not to trust your best friend, that I figured I might as well tell any potential readers; don't be potential, just read the thing.